Jim’s prompt this weeks is "Songs by Tom, Dick, or Harry." You know that looks a little too much like a challenge…

Arguably, the greatest name in bossa nova composition is Antonio Carlos Jobim, who was called "Tom" by his friends, one of whom was Frank Sinatra, with whom he did an album in 1967, Francis Albert Sinatra and Antonio Carlos Jobim. Tom came to the attention of the American listening audience when his song "The Girl From Ipanema" (with Portuguese lyrics from Vincius de Moraes and English lyrics by Norman Gimbel) appeared on the 1964 album Getz/Gilberto, which featured Stan Getz on saxophone, João Gilberto on guitar and vocals, Jobim on piano, and Gilberto’s then-wife Astrud, who had not sung professionally, on two tracks, "The Girl From Ipanema" and "Corcovado." This shot Astrud to stardom, and in 1965 she recorded her first album, named (oddly enough) The Astrud Gilberto Album, from which today’s song, "Dindi" (pronounced jin-jee) is drawn. Jobim wrote the song with Aloysio de Oliveira contributing the Portuguese lyrics and Ray Gilbert the English ones.

The lyrics, from LyricsFreak:

And now a couple of bonus songs to take care of Dick and Harry. First up is The Dick Haymes Trio, doing a song they call "Moritat." The full name of the song is "Die Moritat von Mackie Messer," and is from The Threepenny Opera by Kurt Weill and Bertold Brecht. The title translates to "The Ballad of Mack The Knife" or just "Mack The Knife." This was a Top 10 hit for Haymes in 1956, and for years was used at the top of each hour by radio station WFMF (later WLOO, "FM 100"), a "beautiful music" station in Chicago.

And for Harry, how about some Harry James? Here’s Harry and his orchestra, featuring Buddy Rich on drums, with "Two O’Clock Jump."

And that, my friends, is Song Lyric Sunday and Song of the Day for January 19, 2020. Think I’ll do bossa nova this week…

Jim chose "Bottom/End/Middle/Side/Top" as today’s prompt, which gives me a chance to use this song by Chester Arthur Burnett, better known as Howlin’ Wolf. This is typical of a lot of blues songs, in that you’ll find the line "Meet me in the bottom, bring me my runnin’ shoes" in a lot of different songs, including Robert Johnson’s "Rollin’ and Tumblin’," covered by Muddy Waters, Canned Heat, Cream, and too many others to list. In short, we don’t know exactly who wrote this or who did it first. The words have just been out there all these years for anyone who comes along.

This was evidently recorded at the 1966 Newport Folk Festival; the person who posted it says he got the original film from Alan Lomax. I’m going to guess that the saxophone player is Eddie Shaw, who played with Wolf in his later days in Chicago, and it looks like Hubert Sumlin, Wolf’s longtime guitarist, is on Wolf’s right, off-camera except for a brief moment at the start of the video. The film runs out about a minute from the end, although the music continues. Don’t ask me how.

The lyrics are from LyricsOnDemand.com:

And that’s Song Lyric Sunday for January 12, 2020.

So, today’s prompt from Jim is "la," and I’m certain he intended that it be the musical syllable, as in "La La Means I Love You" by the Delfonics, which I used on New Year’s Eve as my Song of the Day. "Stroke Survivor UK", in fact, commented that he thought I’d use that song today. But, of course, I had other ideas. See, if you take the syllable "la," capitalize the letters and place a period after each one, you get "L. A." which, as everyone knows, is the abbreviation for Los Angeles.

Having figured that out, I came up with a bunch of songs that mention L. A.: "Do You Know The Way To San Jose?" ("L.A. is a great big freeway/Put a hundred down and buy a car") and "Midnight Train To Georgia" ("L. A. proved too much for the man"), for example. Then I remembered this one, a country tune by Susan Raye called "L. A. International Airport." The Blogger’s Best Friend ™ tells us that the song was written by Leanne Scott and recorded originally by David Frizzell in 1970, when it reached #67 on the Country Singles chart. Susan Raye, a protegé of Buck Owens, had the big hit the following year, but not in the US, where it reached #9 on the Country chart and only #54 on the Hot 100. They loved the song in New Zealand, where it reached #1, and in Australia, where it reached #2 on the weekly chart and #5 on the year-end chart.

The lyrics as seen on MetroLyrics:

That’s Song Lyric Sunday (and Song of the Day) for January 5, 2020.

I wanted to do something really different for the last Song Lyric Sunday of 2019, and since Jim came up with the prompt "crazy," I wanted to be sure that it was something that no one else would use. (Having said that, I’m sure everyone will use it.)

"They’re Coming To Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!" is a song written and performed by Jerry Samuels, using the pseudonym Napoleon XIV. At first, it appears to be a song about a man experiencing severe mental anguish over the end of a relationship, but we learn in the last verse that it’s his dog that’s run away and has driven him to distraction. "Napoleon XIV" refers to the stereotype of a man experiencing a nervous breakdown and believing that he’s Napoleon Bonaparte.

Granted, it’s not nice to make fun of people who have nervous breakdowns. Two radio stations (WABC and WMCA, both in New York) stopped playing it after receiving numerous complaints from mental health professionals, and the BBC flat out refused to play it. Nevertheless, the song did quite well, going to #3 on the Hot 100, #1 on the Cash Box Top 100, #2 on the Canadian RPM Top Singles chart, and #4 in the UK in 1966.

The lyrics, courtesy of Genius.com:

By the way, per Wikipedia, the "crazy" voice was achieved the same way that Ross Bagdasarian (aka David Seville) created the voices of Alvin & The Chipmunks. The flip side of the record was the song played in reverse, and the label was a mirror image of the A side’s. And yes, I had the record, as did most of my classmates (we were in 5th grade and thus found it hilarious).

That’s Song Lyric Sunday and Song of the Day for December 28, 2019.

Somehow, I always manage to pull this out every year around this time, and since the prompts for today included "snowman," I figured this was a good time to use it. Okay, Suzy is a snow flake, not a snow man, but the song mentions a snowman, and this is just weird enough that I don’t think anyone else would use it.

"Suzy Snowflake" was written by Sid Tepper and Roy C. Bennett and originally recorded by Rosemary Clooney in 1951. In 1953, a company called Centaur Productions produced a stop-action cartoon based on the song, with animation done by a man named Wah Ming Chang. It was one of three ancient Christmas cartoons shown by TV station WGN in Chicago, all of which I’ll share in the run-up to Christmas. Here it is, sung by an anonymous chorus.

The lyrics, courtesy of SongLyrics.com:

And that’s Song Lyric Sunday (and Song of the Day) for December 23, 2019.